Doodle Devil™ in Review – When God’s work is done, the Devil is just starting to have fun…

The Apple has made a small revolution in the games development industry, for the first time allowing independent developers a cheap and easy way to deliver their products to consumers. This led to the explosion of the App Store, with 250,000+ apps already available and hundreds more being added each day. Of course only a fraction of them truly warrant attention, but the unique few are true gems, bringing to life completely new genres. And the most recent of such are certainly Doodle God™ and the just released Doodle Devil™.

Doodle Devil is sort of a casual meditative puzzle game. You play the role of the Devil and are tasked with the job of showing mankind its true role in the universal order of things. To do so you combine concepts to create new ones, illustrating humanity’s fails and follies. Yeah, yeah, everyone knows the story what happens when you have a human and an apple in the same vicinity. Sin, knowledge and a kick on the backside from heaven.

And this is the basic premise of Doodle Devil. You try and combine concepts and some may lead to new ones being created as a result. After the initial downfall 15 more elements are immediately unlocked for your perusal. Many elements can be achieved in quite a number of different combinations and all of them are accompanied by humorous and appropriate quotes. And some of the combos are quite funny as well, i.e. what do you think you’d get if you crossed a Demon with a Mechanism? A TV of course!

All in all there are 107 concepts to unlock, split into 11 groups, at least in the initial version. Doesn’t seem like too much, but based on how the original Doodle God is treated we can expect more added with updates, possibly along with minigames. And even the included amount is enough; after a while you end up going group by group simply trying all possible combinations. To avoid this the developers added a helpful hint feature, available in two flavours – either illustrating the result for you to guess the elements required or showing two groups where elements may react to unlock a previously undiscovered concept.

The graphics in Doodle Devil are quite well done and despite the name are not limited to the simple crayon style, so popular in many iDevice titles. Instead the artwork and interface looks great with the elements hand-drawn with love and care. My main issue would be the absence of Retina support, which would come in handy, especially for the elements icons. On the whole the interface is slick and easy to use.

Doodle Devil is a logical successor to Doodle God, bringing nothing new to the table but expanding the opportunities a little bit. Personally, after having spent a couple of months with the original game, already updated with over 200 elements, two minigames and a special quest mode, I was a bit disappointed with Doodle Devil. I expected at least a change to the game mechanic, where there’d be something new to the gameplay added and not having just the combo and element list changed. If you haven’t played Doodle God I would definitely advise going for it instead (or at least to start with). If however you’ve already played it through and are hungry for more action, then Doodle Devil is the game for you.